BBC defends spending £1m to find out what viewers want

The BBC spent £1.1m on a consultation exercise that resulted in its television division being renamed BBC Vision and its radio department being rebranded as Audio and Music.

The huge cost of the restructuring - the third such upheaval the BBC has undergone in the last 10 years - included £76,000 spent on consultants, £17,000 on stationery and £140,000 on hotels, hospitality and travel.

In addition, £530,000 was spent on 'audience research' and £125,000 on 'staff costs' while the 'project leaders' - including the BBC director-general Mark Thompson and Jenny Abramsky, the director of radio - racked up another £11,000 in expenses.

The 14-month Creative Future exercise was described as a chance to create an 'open debate' among staff, licence fee payers and industry experts about how the BBC should adapt to the iPod age over the next 10 years.

The results were announced last week and included reorganising BBC departments and renaming them. As well as changing BBC television to BBC Vision, the sport and news departments will be united in a new division called Journalism.

In recognition of the increasing importance of technology and marketing in the digital media age, there is new Future Media and Technology division with a budget of £400m, while the current marketing chief is also getting a beefed-up role in charge of the press office and audience research.

To help staff understand the changes, the BBC also produced a diagram of how the new structure would look - which critics ridiculed as being based on the Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes logo.

Mr Thompson said the changes would help 'streamline decision-making' and make the BBC more efficient.

However BBC staff have expressed dismay at the prospect of yet more upheaval after Mr Thompson's two predecessors - John Birt and Greg Dyke - both pushed through their own restructurings.

And yesterday there was anger at the cost of the exercise at a time when thousands of staff face job cuts.

The former Radio 4 newsreader Patrick Muirhead said: 'Spending a million quid on rechristening its outlets isn't going to attract more viewers, listeners or fool BBC employees. It will just antagonise people.

'And how inspired are these new monikers? You would have got something more imaginative by polling a bunch of five-year-olds in the BBC creche.'

Luke Crawley of the broadcasting union Bectu said: 'It's not obvious the previous system was bust and it's not clear why they want to fix it.

'A proposal that says there's no such thing as radio, it's called audio, sounds like nonsense to me.'

Details of the cost of the Creative Future project come just weeks after the BBC was embroiled in controversy after it emerged that senior executives had been awarded pay rises of up to 30 per cent.

The figures, released under the Freedom of Information act, reveal that six consultants were hired for the project including former BBC controller of strategy and marketing Susan Denham, who was paid £26,000.

Other costs include £69,000 on 'IT and telephony', £125,000 on hosting seminars for staff and other 'stakeholders' and £88,000 on 'miscellaneous spend.'

A BBC spokesman said: 'This sounds like a lot of money but the next 10 years are going to see the biggest changes in the history of broadcasting.

'It would be irresponsible of us not to have had a thorough consultation process as we prepare for those changes.

'We carry out this process every 10 years and it results in plenty of things that audiences appreciate and value - such as bbc.co.uk and Cbeebies, the children's television channel - both of which were born out of the last such review.'